Hot Young Designers Club | Interior Design Business Podcast · Hot Young Designers Club

144: How Rasheeda Gray Connected Her Purpose with Her Work

·59 min·3 clips

Staging our own house accidentally launched a design career.

Rebecca and Sean open loose. They bring in Rashida Gray from Gray Space Interiors after saying they have wanted this conversation for a long time, and the whole thing has a bestie table feel. Rashida explains that design is her second career, after 15 years in marketing for insurance and financial services. Gray Space started in 2016. From there, the talk moves into the practical guts of running a design business without squeezing the life out of the creative part. Rashida likes a target. Her studio uses a 180-day project KPI, but she is clear that kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, and whole-house work do not all behave the same way. That is the useful bit here. It is a working designer saying projects need structure, and also, life and construction still do what they do. The roles get specific fast. Rashida describes herself as lead designer and the person carrying the extra entrepreneur work. Megan sounds essential. As operations specialist, she handles procurement, project management, marketing materials, email blasts, and the background work that keeps the studio moving. Rebecca catches the teamwork right away. Each client has a lead designer, either Rashida or the junior designer, with Megan on operations. Then the phases get divided. Megan usually takes over phases three and five, especially the tail end, while the design leads stay heavier at the beginning. The hiring story helps explain why it works: Rashida and Megan had already worked together for five years. The close turns warm, with Rashida saying helping each other is the only way she knows how to be, and the hosts pointing listeners toward what she has coming next.

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